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Looking in an unlikely place for signs of a world in
transformation, William E. Jones’s video essay The Fall of
Communism As Seen in Gay Pornography (1998) compiles footage
from gay porn films produced between 1993 and 1998 in the former
Eastern bloc and distributed in the United States. Watching this
film recently I was struck by how disturbing Jones’s montage
remains today. Under twenty minutes long, the footage is arranged
into two chapters, each constructed around a visual motif. The
first assembles brief close-up portraits in which young men look
straight at the camera, some with pleasure, but most with
insecurity, disgust or blatant indifference to the sexual exchanges
taking place off-screen. The staging of the scenes in modest
domestic interiors, alongside the artist’s commentary, underlines
the actors’ inexperience and points at the conditions of
exploitation surrounding these productions, which were made at a
time when the porn industry sought to reap economic profit from the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Presented as auditions, but
distributed for consumption, longer sequences in the second part of
the film show interviews conducted by a British male, whose face
and body remain largely off-screen. He asks young men intimate
questions about their sex lives and reasons for appearing in these
films, at times stroking them as they pose for the camera — the
contrast of his gold watch and fine blue shirt against their cheap
clothes, or bare skin, standing as a sign of capitalism’s victory
over communism. Their short replies leave us with no doubt: they
are loaning their bodies to the camera in exchange for Western
money ($50 per session, according to the artist).

In the simple gesture of a glance back at the camera, Jones
captures the vulnerability of a generation that came of age in a
moment of political uncertainty. Two decades later, and at another
geo-political turning point — when the United States and Europe’s
hegemonic position within global financial capitalism is in crisis
— those glances are a poignant reminder of the human experience
that lies behind the economic statistics on newspaper front pages.
Likewise, this issue of Afterall attempts to shift our
attention away from the intangible drama of fluctuating and
ever-faster flows of abstract capital, and towards the question of
how the mobility of people, information and affects shapes
subjectivities, our bodies and our desires. Concerned with an
embodied politics of mobility, the essays brought together here ask
whether an aesthetic and political imaginary based on change still
holds a subversive potential today. Can mobility encapsulate a
critique of the way identity is policed, or has its meaning been
reduced to a state of permanent adaptability to the needs of the
market?

In the opening essay, Vassilis S. Tsianos and Dimitris
Papadopoulos counter the common understanding of migration as a
merely reactive force, considering instead the creative agency of
migration and its ability to stir political change. Charting the
role that migrant labour has played in the consolidation of
neoliberal capitalism over the past fifty years, the authors
propose that today’s trans-migration constitutes the death drive of
capitalism — as well as the death drive of the left liberal and
revolutionary thinking, since it ultimately undermines any
political imagination based on national citizenship. Conceiving of
migration as an autonomous social force, they call for a
redefinition of political subjectivities as the working classes
become both transnational and precarious.

Such a shift in perspective — one that understands migrant
subjectivities not in relation to a static definition of political
identity but as a process of becoming — is not only relevant for a
representation of transnational mobility, but also of queer
subjectivities. As Roger Cook, quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
reminds us in this issue, ‘queer is a continuing moment, movement,
motive — recurrent, eddying, troublant’.1 The crossing of positions characteristic of
queer subjectivities is manifest in Pauline Boudry and Renate
Lorenz’s film installations, which portray ways of being that defy
normative definitions of identity and celebrate self-determination
instead. In their films, queer performers re-stage historical
portraits of characters that have resisted the constraints of
capitalism, patriarchy or colonialism, and whose ‘otherness’ has
often signified marginalisation, if not persecution. Lukas
Duwenhögger’s theatrical paintings and installations also draw from
the history of homosexual social and cultural codes, and their use
of irony, to visualise an identity built on difference. Tracing a
parallel between Jacques Rancière’s theory of disagreement and
queer theories of difference, Cook suggests that Duwenhögger’s
incarnation of a specifically queer experience of dissent in an
aesthetic form transcends any categorisation as ‘homosexual’.

Attention to gesture and the staging of the self are also
significant features of Sven Augustijnen’s films. As with
Duwenhögger’s, his work is also invested in a specific context —
Belgian history and its postcolonial ramifications — and yet it
speaks of how any collective and personal identity is
performatively constructed by means of more or less conscious
omissions, and even delusional self-inventions. His latest film,
Spectres (2011), portrays a man’s obsession to erase from
history his personal involvement, and that of his country, in the
suffocation of the independence of Congo and the assassination of
its prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. Augustijnen’s use of
a personal (and distorted) lens to address such a vast political
issue as postcolonial trauma contrasts with Paul Chan’s
obliteration of the images of violence in his video essays on the
recent American war on terrorism, Tin Drum Trilogy
(2002—05). As Paolo Magagnoli argues, Chan’s abstracted images are
also an attempt to restore a human dimension to the media’s
‘pornography’ of war.

In this issue, we also consider how artistic practices have
addressed the fluidity of geographical and cultural borders
following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Held in a Budapest
apartment in 1987 and organised by the artists’ group Inconnu, the
exhibition ‘A harcoló város’ (‘The Fighting City’) brought together
international and local artists’ tributes to the 1956 revolution.
Just before the opening, however, the artworks were seized by the
police and later destroyed. Juliane Debeusscher analyses Inconnu’s
use of Western media to give international visibility to both the
exhibition and the confiscation of the artworks, thus exposing the
regime’s politics of censorship and countering the government’s
attempt to launder its international reputation via the promotion
of a politically innocuous ‘Eastern European art’. Working in
neighbouring Zagreb since the 1950s, Ivan Kožarić’s radically
self-questioning sculptural practice has been irreducible to such
political branding, while also defying artistic categorisation.
Impermeable to Socialist Realism as much as modernism, Kožarić has
refused to align his work with either geo-political or stylistic
divides, following only the trail of artistic intuition.

The unstable boundary between East and West and their fruitful
encounters is the focus of the artistic collective Slavs and
Tatars. Discussing the potential pitfalls of their intercultural
artistic approach, Anders Kreuger gauges the balance between
socio-political concerns and aesthetic style, exoticism and nuanced
analysis in their exhibitions and publications. Slavs and Tatars’
interest in syncretism, which is the subject of their most recent
project, Not Moscow Not Mecca (2012), resounds in the work
of Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva, whose filmed performances
merge together different historical periods and cultural
influences. Yuliya Sorokina considers Menlibayeva’s practice as the
incarnation of a nomadic culture, while Viktor Misiano
contextualises it amongst the first post-Soviet generation of
artists working in Central Asia, analysing her redefinition of the
role of women and their representation within Kazakhstan’s new
national identity.

Menlibayeva’s portrayal of a heroic Central Asian female is a
response to the same world in transition that The Fall of
Communism As Seen in Gay Pornography so chillingly depicts,
similarly reflecting on the changes brought about by the collapse
of the Soviet Union through the representation of embodied
subjectivities. In contrast to Jones’s materialist analysis,
however, Menlibayeva embraces the representational gap left by a
crumbling regime as an opportunity to make up a new and more
autonomous image of women. Many of the artists discussed in this
issue of Afterall also attempt to represent subjectivities
in flux, which respond to the increasing porosity of borders
between territories, but also political and gender positions. Each
invested in particular histories, geographies and contexts, they
seek to embody universally accessible experiences of aesthetic
dissent.

Footnotes

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, London and New York:
Routledge, 1994, p.8. See Roger Cook’s essay on Lukas Duwenhögger
in this issue of Afterall, pp.61—71.↑